Warren Buffett thinks the Republican health care bill has an alternative purpose: to help the already-wealthy make even more money.
The famed investor and world’s second-richest person had some choice words about the legislation currently being debated by the Senate, suggesting it could be called the “Relief for the Rich Act” during an interview with PBS NewsHour Tuesday.
My tunes, evergreen. Seriously. As good as Iggy & the Stooges, easy.
The unplugged version.
I gave up fighting. I’m with the tenor of the country. Take away my Medicaid. I am undeserving.
Remember, you can download the unplugged version for your gadget. Send it to a friend, even.
Now, please start a campaign to raise money for a Mitchell electric/acoustic guitar — 149 dollars at Guitar Center.
On a slightly more serious note: Can you believe this tuneage is fives years old and HAS ONLY BECOME MORE REAL? IT’S VIRTUALLY THE NATIONAL CREED.
he Clinton campaign has now spent months trying to convince relatively obscure former Republican officials to endorse her campaign while also adopting many Republican slogans and arguments in her quest for the presidency …
Clinton gave a speech in Ohio on Wednesday with yet another former Bush official, James Clad. The speech was billed as touting “American exceptionalism???, one of the more repellent nationalistic concepts that Republicans have used to shame progressives in the past. She spoke mostly about foreign policy, a subject in which Clinton – with her penchant for supporting foreign wars and beefed up US military presence everywhere – seemingly has more in common with mainstream Republicans than the Obama administration.
To paraphrase Julian Assange: Cholera or gonorrhea?
There was a big list of “Americana” records in the Guardian today, coming from many famous artists: Bruce, the Drive-By Truckers, Dwight Yoakam, etc. Bring them on.
Because nothing beats “Ricin Mama” for REAL Americana, absolutely nothing. Torn from the pages of the news, utter desperation, zombie TV and the heart of Texas. Originally endorsed by federal lawmen, too! From an album, “Old White Coot.”
But, better still, you can be a Russian Manchurian candidate or a Russian symp, particularly if you think pushing missile batteries in NATO always closer to Moscow is a lousy idea. It’s genuinely fascinating how my party became more cynically paranoid and pro-pre-thermonuclear war than the other side.
[If] there’s a common theme to this most recent wave of GOP dissenters, it’s just how eerily close they sound to Hillary Clinton’s talking points.
“He is unable or unwilling to separate truth from falsehood,??? the GOP national security leaders said in the letter. “He does not encourage conflicting views. He lacks self-control and acts impetuously. He cannot tolerate personal criticism. He has alarmed our closest allies with his erratic behavior. All of these are dangerous qualities in an individual who aspires to be president and commander in chief, with command of the US nuclear arsenal.???
Trump is a cat’s paw of Putin. WikiLeaks, The Intercept, Glenn Greenwald, others are all in the tank for Russia to influence the US infection. If you’re not pro-HRC, you’re for Russian hackers.
“[Let’s] hope the unlikely unity extends beyond the neocons and with any luck, lasts longer than the election,” writes the explainer at The Guardian.
Omar Mateen’s calling of 911 from the toilet of the Pulse and subsequent declaration of allegiance to ISIS was just a smokescreen. Mateen knew he was going to be killed and tried to set the story. In this he was successful.
In my estimation, Mateen was a loathsome and apparently very vain American man who just happened to be Muslim. He blew a spoke because he was gay or bisexual, couldn’t be a human being about it and so decided to kill a lot of gay people at a club he frequented. Using his paramilitary/police training and weaponry. Self-radicalized, my butt.
Mateen’s obsession with selfies was and is nothing less than nauseating. It’s not the picture of a Muslim terrorist. It’s the picture of someone, very disagreeable, in love with himself. Mateen probably sent them to many people he wished to hook up with (it now appears this is so), unbidden, who woke up to the news of his massacre and said to themselves, “Oh, jeezus, that guy!”
This story will come out. There were people at the club quite familiar with Mateen but now circumspect in what they have to say, understandably so, because they don’t want the FBI, Homeland Security and the media crawling all over them.
Would you?
This is most probably the central truth of the massacre, one that our six figure media explainers and terrorism experts simply won’t want to attribute without wasting everyone’s time concocting some long, stupid and convoluted story about ISIS and its inspiration to those not yet fully realized terrorists.
“Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump reacted to the Orlando shooting with evidence that they can agree on at least one thing: bombing people,” reads The Intercept. “Both candidates called for an escalation of the U.S.-led bombing campaign against ISIS in Syria and Iraq.”
You would expect nothing else.
Right on schedule, sales of AR-15s/M-16s jump. The real national character is defined by the image of the assault rifle, one aimed at your head.
Another atrocity, or My Lai moment, has arrived for the US military in what was described superciliously as its pointless bombing wars last week.
Whether the American government will actually do something about it other than issue the usual get-out-of-jail-free card as it has done with every single hit job in the last decade remains to be seen. Personally, I’d bet against anything more than the equivalents of shit happens and/or they had it coming.
The Army Green Berets who requested the Oct. 3 airstrike on the Doctors without Borders trauma center in Afghanistan were aware it was a functioning hospital but believed it was under Taliban control, The Associated Press has learned …
A day before an American AC-130 gunship attacked the hospital, a senior officer in the Green Beret unit wrote in a report that U.S. forces had discussed the hospital with the country director of the medical charity group, presumably in Kabul, according to two people who have seen the document.
The attack left a mounting death toll, now up to 30 people.
Separately, in the days before the attack, “an official in Washington” asked Doctors without Borders “whether our hospital had a large group of Taliban fighters in it,” spokesman Tim Shenk said in an email. “We replied that this was not the case. We also stated that we were very clear with both sides to the conflict about the need to respect medical structures.”
The hospital was destroyed by the gunship and is now abandoned.
“Doctors without Borders has said it was frantically calling Kabul and Washington during the attack, trying to make the U.S. aware of what was unfolding as patients died in their beds,” rreports AP.
“Presumably, the gun camera video from the plane would show whether anyone was firing from the hospital.”
Although the gun camera video has not yet been made available, in the past the US military has not been particularly reticent about showing AC-130 gun ships hosing down buildings, vehicles and alleged terrorists. There are exampleson YouTube, often accompanied by quite a bit of bragging about its merciless power.
A week ago, there was a great deal of excuse making and assertion that if a war crime had been executed, it would be hard to prove.
From NPR:
John Bellinger, a former legal adviser to the State Department, says the bombing of the hospital was a terrible tragedy, but he believes it would be a rush to judgment to call it a war crime.
“The mere fact that civilians are killed, that a hospital is damaged, doesn’t automatically mean that there has been a war crime,” he says. “It only becomes a war crime if it is shown that the target was intentionally attacked.”
If the AP’s report is good, there goes that argument.
At the end of summer, my friend in the Dick Destiny Band was in Connecticut for a week, getting back together with his old buddies in a high school covers band so they could entertain at a small gathering that would be his class’ 45th reunion. The next to last day he was there an old classmate had him lifting furniture and while doing it some kind of mishap occurred and he suffered a detached retina.
A detached retina that is worsening by the hour is a serious health crisis. Any time part of the field of vision in one eye suddenly goes away is cause for an immediate trip to a doctor. In a country with a functioning health care system that cares for everybody, more or less equally, immediacy wouldn’t be a problem unless one was caught out in the wild.
That’s not the United States. It’s people aren’t up to it. Not even close. Even with the practice of Obamacare, it’s clear a significant portion of the populace has no belief in medicine for all being universally available, and quickly, as part of a civilized society.
My friend grew up in one of the wealthiest counties of Connecticut, attending a ritzy high school for the upper and upper middle classes in a genteel coastal community.
However, when a condition requiring immediate medical attention arose, no one could find it in themselves to do the right thing and get him immediately to a physician. Why? The insurance industry, essentially, and money. No one wanted to be left holding the bag if the local medical facilities weren’t interested in his kind of medical benefits. (Veterans coverage, essentially.)
So they put him on a plane home the next day, when he was scheduled to leave anyway. And in the intervening period, as well as on the trip across country, the torn retina became, as one might expect, worse. It was shameful behavior. The people involved, old classmates, lacked even the ability to feel concern over it.
When my friend arrived back in Pasadena he immediately consulted his eye doctor. This man, along with his colleagues, where exposed as what one might dub rich mens’ medical providers. There was this saintly worry that vet benefits might not cover care in sufficient amount or get going/pay with sufficient alacrity.
And what was recognized was that it was time to stop arguing, checking and diddling around because the good people, the right people, the chosen fortunate, the upper crust, their grand American health network, wasn’t for my friend, not even in an emergency.
Still, serious medical crisis — potential for permanent blindness in one eye. This meant getting dumped on USC/LA County hospital, aka “county,” where those (and you’ll like this description) in the population that are underserved by US healthcare go. That means the lower and lower middle class, you know — the poor, the not-white.
At USC/County my friend finally got what he needed. His retina was stabilized by cryogenic procedure and successive laser surgeries reattached it. However, weeks later, the degree of success or what subsequent treatment will be required still cannot be determined. He got the treatment he needed, late, when the problem was demonstrably worse than it was across the country when the incident that led to it occurred.
And the experience at USC/County shows the disparity in apportionment of resources that still exists in the US health system.
USC/County gets a huge number of people to treat, many, many with some form of insurance, working people, all who arrive with appointments. And when you arrive, once you have been stabilized, a triage that cannot be avoided occurs and every visit takes five to six hours out of your day as you wait for the heavily burdened system to get to you.
The middle class, those that still have corporate or good government health care plans, and their owners in the plutocracy, they don’t have to put up with it. Despite Obamacare, or perhaps because American business, the predatory health insurance industry and equally predatory doctors were allowed to write it, medical resources are applied in a staggeringly unequal way in America.
America does not do medicine. It does health care, even in a crisis, as a posh commodity, something for the good people first. Everyone else, later. Or root, hog or die.
You’d better believe there’s no quality of mercy, and certainly nothing good, in a national health system which sees nothing particularly atrocious in shipping someone across the country to dump at emergency services in LA because the patient’s benefits aren’t cadillac.
Edward Ericson Jr’s. TEDx talk on the sharing economy. Or as he points out, the bringing of the black market economies of failed and near-failed states to the US, except with the added convenience of a smartphone app.
He puts it wryly, but every effectively, dubbing it the model of the social network in Laos, or anyplace else people are in the street giving small amounts of cash money to anyone who can give them a ride in their overburdened mini-bus.
The Silicon Valley geniuses, he says, have no use for a social contract.
Everyone will be forced to take a bunch of jobs, none of which, separately or in the aggregate, earn any kind of living.
As the country descends into the maelstrom of all-against-all, the wealthy and their very close servants, those who haven’t yet been deemed an extra expense that could be better atomized through crowd-sourcing, get cheap cab rides, delivery of groceries, and their business meetings transcribed at a few pennies to a quarter an hour.
You just can’t call people unclean vermin. It’s a lesson Ted Nugent learned the hard way yesterday.
Yes, the wheels must have popped off the Ted Nugent tour bus last night when news arrived that another Indian tribe, the Puyallup, canceled the two shows he had at their casino in Tacoma at the beginning of next month. The Coeur D’Alene tribe of Idaho canceled his gig at its casino on Monday. (Note: Nugent relies a great deal on casino gigs. And the casinos are the property of Native Americans.)
“The First Amendment gives people the right free speech, but I think racism is intolerable and not acceptable here,??? Puyallup Tribal Council Vice President Lawrence W. LaPointe told a news agency.
Media Matters quickly queried a number of prominent rock music promoters around the country about the Nugent cancellations. The consensus was his racist image has become such a liability its starting to really hurt his music business.
“No one should be surprised by any of this,” Gary Bongiovanni, editor-in-chief of Pollstar USA, told Media Matters. “It’s a free country and Nugent has always had a big mouth. But if he keeps making incendiary statements his future tours may be limited to NRA conventions and Fox News events.”
Dives in the deep southern part of WhiteManistan, too.
